Saturday, September 21, 2013

Black Suffrage in Pennsylvania: The Tale of Hector Tyndale, Part 3

The Battle of Antietam was not the last fight for Hector
Tyndale. Amazingly, he recovered from his wound and returned to service, taking
command of a brigade in the 11th Corps as brigadier general and he
led it through the confusing night action at Wauhatchie in late-October 1863.
Unfortunately, his wound continued to plague him. Tyndale went home on a
thirty-day furlough to recuperate, and when he returned to the army, he still
felt unable to perform his duties. In August 1864, “with painful regret,” he
wrote, he tendered his resignation, hoping that able officers awaiting
promotion to brigade command would rise to fill his spot.

Tyndale did not retire from public life. In fact, he yearned
to lead again. In June 1868, after four years of recuperation, he announced his
intent to run for mayor of Philadelphia and received the nomination of the
Republican Party. His selection pleased many Republicans. The party had
traditionally done poorly in the city (to that point, it had put only two
mayors into office), but with a war hero on the platform, one without any
connections to corrupt political circles, Tyndale stood a good chance of
winning. “Thoroughly upright in his political principles,” wrote a self-serving
Republican paper, “he can be controlled by no ‘Ring,’ nor will he permit the
offices in his control to be applied to any corrupt use. . . . The Democratic
Party has no man to offer whose personal and official record is brighter than
his.”

The
Republicans were far too optimistic. The Democratic Party nominated Dan M. Fox
and unleashed a bitter smear campaign against Tyndale. First, Democratic papers
accused him of being an atheist, an accusation that Tyndale had a difficult
time dodging since he did not belong to any church. Then, predictably, the
Democratic paper in Philadelphia, the Age,
quoted him as saying that John Brown was “a better man than Jesus Christ.” (This
accusation came from Charles J. Biddle, a Democrat and former Union officer
who, apparently, questioned Tyndale about a portrait of John Brown hanging in
his house.) Republican newspapers did their best to reinforce Tyndale’s
religious activities and to distance the candidate from the memory of John
Brown. Of course, everyone knew that Tyndale had escorted Mary Brown to
Harper’s Ferry to help recover John Brown’s body, but not every voter
understood the non-existent relationship between Tyndale and Brown. Democrats
supposed that Tyndale was a radical abolitionist (the Age called him a “disciple of John Brown”); Republicans claimed
that Tyndale and John Brown had never met. The Daily Evening Bulletin explained, “We happen to know all about
General Tyndale’s connection with and estimate of John Brown. He believes John
Brown to have been a brave, pure, honest misguided enthusiast, whom Virginia
had a perfect right to hang. He believes the way in which Virginia hung him was
needlessly brutal and cowardly. He had no knowledge of Brown except what was
open to everybody through the newspapers.” Further, the paper declared, when
coerced to escort Mary Brown to Harpers Ferry, Tyndale expressed no love for
Brown’s motive, but merely a “humane chivalrous spirit” to accompany a widow on
her dangerous mission. When Election Day neared, one desperate newspaper
implored, “VOTE ONLY FOR SUCH MEN AS WERE LOYAL TO THE COUNTRY IN 1861!”

Charles J. Biddle, a former Union officer and contributor to the Philadelphia Age, spread the rumor that Tyndale believed that John Brown was "a better man than Jesus Christ."

In the end, the damage control was not enough. Tyndale lost
the election to Fox, 59,679 to 61,517. In fact, the Republican Party lost in
Pennsylvania across the board, largely because the Republican-dominated legislature
had proposed an amendment to the state constitution to allow for black suffrage.
Tyndale had steered clear of supporting this, but he knew that if black
suffrage had been allowed in 1868, his association with Brown’s widow would
have been an asset for his campaign, not a hindrance to it. Philadelphia had
more than 7,000 black men of voting age. Had they cast their ballots, they
would have swept Tyndale into office. After all, he was the man who recovered the
remains of the nation’s most well-known abolitionist.

Tyndale’s lost election in 1868 accounted for a sudden
change in tone of Pennsylvania’s Republican Party in 1869. Party heads now realized
they needed black voters to beat the Democrats. When the 15th
Amendment passed the federal Congress that year, Republicans in Harrisburg
leaped at the chance to ratify it. One politician who demonstrated a noted
change was John Geary, Pennsylvania’s Republican governor. In 1868, Geary had
been only lukewarm to a state amendment. In 1869, he encouraged ratification
whole-heartedly. One wonders if Tyndale—who had served with Geary in the 28th
Pennsylvania—had any influence on Geary’s change of opinion.

John White Geary served as Pennsylvania's postwar governor. Although he barely supported a black suffrage amendment to the Commonwealth's constitution in 1868, he strongly endorsed ratification of the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1869. Did Tyndale's defeat alter Geary's opinion on black voting?

In any event, the change had sweeping effects. Pennsylvania’s
first black vote came in the year 1870. That year, Republican returns in
Philadelphia made a great leap forward. Infamously, the next year, during the
mayoral election of 1871, Mayor Fox, stung by the loss in the city, turned his
policemen loose against black voters, driving them from the polls. (I often
tell my students that during Reconstruction, the South had the Klan to control
elections; the North had the Philadelphia police department.) Election riots
broke out in five city wards, and at least three black voters died trying to
exercise their right to franchise. Of course, black voting came to Pennsylvania
to stay. It is often forgotten that Tyndale’s controversial election had been
integral in making it happen.

This clipping shows the murder of Octavius Catto, a Philadelphia educator who lost his life in the election riots of 1871. Most likely, his murderers were members of the Philadelphia police department, operating under orders of the Democratic mayor, Daniel M. Fox.

Tyndale was not in Philadelphia for the riots. He retired
from politics and traveled Europe for several years, returning in 1876 to serve
as a judge for the city’s Centennial Exposition. On March 19, 1880, a severe
heart attack caused by his Antietam wound killed him.

It is clear that Tyndale was no disciple of John Brown, yet
his connection with America’s most notorious abolitionist transformed him into
an unlikely proponent of black suffrage. Tyndale might even be rightly called
an abolitionist himself—maybe not one of a radical stripe—but a man whose
principles toward humanity inevitably led him to this path: to serve Widow
Brown, to serve the Union army, and to serve the postwar Republican Party.
Interestingly, abolitionist William Furness—a man who had stood alongside
Tyndale in 1859 during the riot over John Brown’s body—delivered Tyndale’s
eulogy. He called Tyndale a “lover of Freedom and Humanity.” Furness continued,
“He is joined now to the invisible host of patriots and martyrs, whose memory
speaks to the North with mediatorial power, charging us to be faithful still to
the sacred cause for which they suffered, and to permit no advantage purchased
for Justice and Freedom with their blood, to be lost through a base and cunning
policy.”